columnists

Biography

Pete McMartin is an award-winning journalist, but then, who isn't? He grew up in Windsor, Ontario, and has been with The Sun since 1976, a year in which, as the paper's newly-minted harbour reporter, he caused a small riot on the Vancouver fishermen's wharf by erroneously reporting the price of crab. Other missteps followed, too numerous to list here.

He is 60, and can't seem to lose those last 10 pounds. He has never published a collection of his columns, on the conviction there are too many journalists' books crowding remainder tables already. He will continue to write his column until they wrench his laptop from his cold, dead hands or until he pays off his mortgage, whichever comes first.

Entitlement

On Monday, The Vancouver Sun print edition ran a front-page piece by reporter Tara Carman about elderly refugees receiving $11,000 annually as a “baseline entitlement” from the provincial government. That money, directed only to those refugees in B.C. with no financial means of support, matches the provincial welfare rate of $906.42 a month.

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VICTORIA — Premier Christy Clark’s once-promising relationship with the building trades has frayed, to judge from the legal challenge the construction unions filed Monday against BC Hydro’s Site C project. The B.C. Supreme Court action accuses the government-owned utility of trampling the constitutional rights of construction workers in its approach to building the $8.8-billion hydroelectric project at Site C on the Peace River.

It’s not that Shawn Matthias didn’t believe Jim Benning specifically when told by a reporter an hour before Monday’s trade deadline that the winger could relax because the Vancouver Canucks’ general manager liked his team and wasn’t trading anyone off the roster. Matthias simply wouldn’t trust any National Hockey League manager on deadline day.

In a transit referendum battle pitting the Canadian Taxpayers Federation’s local representative against a Goliath of political, business and union advocates for the Yes side, Jordan Bateman is the guy with the slingshot.

The Surrey couple accused of the foiled 2013 Canada Day terror plot bickered about everything from their drug addictions to whether Islamic law permitted trimming body hair. As they stuffed pressure cookers with rusty nails and shrapnel, John Nuttall occasionally harangued his wife Amanda Korody a bit too much, causing her to snap: “You are being a nuisance!”